Everyone should get to see what happens in VA hospitals Such visits should be required before nation's leaders decide to go to war

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Lynne Kantor – James J. Peters VA Medical Media
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Biomedical engineers Pierre Asselin, left, and Drew Fineberg, help Air Force veteran Ian James Brown get into the ReWalk exoskeleton walking system. The James J. Peters VA Medical Center, Bronx, N.Y., which writer Steven Benardo described, is the first veterans facility to use the ReWalk, which allows a paraplegic to walk and climb stairs, a hospital spokesman said.

Lynne.Kantor

In 1960, I played a little league baseball game on the grounds of the veterans hospital in the Bronx. Following that pleasant afternoon, all of us were required to visit a soldier in the hospital. I had no way of knowing that 52 years later I would be visiting my father in one of those beds.

Those beautifully manicured fields are gone and have been replaced by facilities that need to treat the thousands of Americans that we have sent to battle, from Korea to Central America, from Vietnam and Laos to Iraq and Afghanistan.

My brother and I were never told of the mayhem my father faced on the beach in Normandy in 1944, when he sustained significant wounds that scar his whole body to this day. He made sure our opportunities to see the shrapnel wounds were so limited that he went swimming with us wearing long-sleeve shirts; he always left the shower fully robed.

After college I met my wife. Her father was Pearl Harbor survivor who, later in the war, received the last radio message from Corregidor. To the day he died six years ago, Dec. 7 had more meaning to him than any other day in the year. His name is etched into the Pearl Harbor memorial on Memorial Island in Vero Beach, and a brick honoring his service exists at the memorial to the Four Chaplains in Sebastian.

He grieved his friends who were killed that day on that Hawaiian beach. And, he too, spoke rarely of the horrors of war and in so many ways shielded his children from the stories that haunted and motivated him the rest of his life. Yes, he was motivated to be a good father and good citizen because he knew that must be the legacy of a war.

My uncle received the Bronze Star at the Battle of the Bulge, and my son spent two and a half years in the Israeli Army. So, I understand and appreciate not only the consequences of war but also, unfortunately, that there are necessary wars. I demand that this country have the best trained, best equipped, best paid and best taken care of veterans in the world.

Yet, anyone, public official or just plain citizen, should be required — as a matter of good conscience if not good citizenship — to visit one of the veterans hospitals from time to time. See the young faces and bodies caught up in vague policies developed by people who rarely face anything more terrifying than heavy traffic.

Stand there for an hour and then, and only then, announce the next war is so necessary that we will replace ball fields for more hospital beds.